The Support Specialists handle the support boards, Reply to support requests, follow up on cold cases left behind by the Support Helpers and other community members, moderate the forum where needed, supply Charter Member support through the Helpdesk and the forum, Seek out and call out possible support helpers of the month, seek out and call out possible future team members, and take part in the software development, planning and documentation and beta testing from the support viewpoint - since we are usually the folks who see what areas of the software and documentation cause the most trouble to the end users And like all team members, we are not limited to doing only this, the teams are meant to be specialists in their own field, but can also do things that fall to other teams territory.

"Before you allow people access to your forum, especially in an administrative position, you must be aware that that person can seriously damage your forum. Therefore, you should only allow people that you trust, implicitly, to have such access." -Douglas

can we nominate employees for this? I have gotten a lot of help recently from many of the regular staff, and even some from the regular joes as well

If you or perhaps others are willing to contribute, please do take a look at the possibilities:http://www.simplemachines.org/contribute/I'm not sure if you meant "employees" as referring to the SMF Support Specialists, but in case you did, then as stated above, Support Specialists are not anyone's "employees". They're doing this work for free, and because they want to spend their time helping users around SMF. And there aren't really obstacles to anyone doing that: most of the community forum here is meant for helping SMF forums admins, as much as possible, and this help can be given by anyone.